Beckett on the TV (it's Krapp's last videotape)

The plays of one of last century's most radical dramatists have finally made it to the small screen.

Serious artists are forever doing the dirty on us. Their lives never live up to our high-minded expectations. Look at Schoenberg. The formidable intellectual whose 12-tone music revolutionised musical composition wound up in Hollywood playing tennis with George Gershwin. Then there's that Nobel-Prize-winning writer, tennis fan and sometime player Samuel Beckett. Fond of a glass of Jamieson's, he also read Agatha Christie and, when in London, used to slope back to the house of director Anthony Page to play Mozart piano duets.

What's this? Samuel Beckett, the 20th century's most formally radical and influential dramatist revealed as a hedonist? Any minute now someone will suggest that he once made a movie with Buster Keaton. He did, actually, in 1964. Being by Beckett it was pithily entitled Film and Alan Schneider shot it under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Bar the single word, "Ssshhhh", it was silent and starred Keaton, a cat, and a (very recalcitrant) Chihuahua.

That experiment aside, Beckett (who died in 1989) turned down offers to film his plays throughout his life. Peter O'Toole wanted to film Waiting for Godot but was refused. This most theatrical of dramatists did grant permission for a few BBC TV versions – notably Not I, his torrential monologue in which only Billie Whitelaw's spotlit mouth is visible jabbering away in terror – but that was about it.

Now, however, Channel 4 have filmed all 19 of his plays from his groundbreaking tragi-comedy Waiting for Godot, to his 45-second piece Breath, written in 1969 as a wry prologue to Kenneth Tynan's notorious nude revue Oh, Calcutta!, but swiftly pulled when Beckett saw the staging. The new film of the latter has a voice-over by Keith Allen and is directed by Damien Hirst which gives an indication of the personnel fielded by producers Michael Colgan and Alan Maloney. Neil Jordan directs Julianne Moore in Not I; John Hurt reprises his celebrated stage solo in Krapp's Last Tape; Anthony Minghella teams up again with Kristin Scott Thomas, Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson for Play ... the list goes on and on.

This wildly ambitious project – to be screened on Channel 4 across weekends this summer – has been conducted beneath the infamously beady gaze of the Beckett estate. It once cancelled a tour of the Deborah Warner/Fiona Shaw production of Footfalls for failing to observe some of Beckett's stage directions. Thus, most of the films stick close to his fiercely detailed instructions. Beckett, however, clearly had a sense of humour about his exactitude. In Catastrophe, directed here by David Mamet, Harold Pinter plays an insistent director whose assistant (Mrs Mamet aka Rebecca Pidgeon) is positioning an actor – John Gielgud, in what turned out to be his final performance. "The craze for explicitation," hrrumphs Pinter's character sardonically, "every 'i' dotted".

Penelope Wilton, playing the woman in Richard Eyre's beautifully controlled and elegiac film of Rockaby, is in a better position than most to judge the pros and cons of filming Beckett. She worked with him in 1976 when Play was revived at the Royal Court. "He was an extremely soft-spoken man with spiky hair, chiselled features and wonderful blue eyes. I expected to be very nervous of him but he was extraordinarily approachable. He couldn't have been kinder."

She values the possibilities of close-up, being able to home in on the detail in his deeply distilled visual and verbal language. "He's a fantastically compassionate writer, there's nothing he doesn't dare say. He writes about those four-o'clock-in-the-morning times when you talk and talk and can't get out of a feeling." She sees her character as looking for another human being, for communication. "She keeps lowering the ante as she struggles against the dying, so when she says that line 'Fuck life', it's terribly shocking. In the end, it's a poem to loneliness."

Alan Rickman, forced to recount at top speed the inane details of an adulterous affair in Minghella's mesmerising account of Play, is similarly astute about the writing: "They're not plays, they're sculptures."

Whether they are closer to the ambiguous nature of poetry or the completely finished quality of sculpture, neither of those art forms is a natural for film representation. What is so astonishing about Minghella's piece is that where several of the other directors have merely collected a play on film, his absolutely succeeds as a piece of cinema.

A self-styled Beckett obsessive – his unfinished doctoral thesis was on Play – he was in an airport lounge in Australia when he read about the project, grabbed a phone and called his agent. "She got them on the line while my bag was coming off the luggage carousel." Play has three characters in funeral urns individually interrogated by a beam of light. Whenever they're caught in it they try to escape purgatory by incessantly repeating the – often comic – story of their marriage and adultery. Minghella hit upon a way of refreshing Play for film by simply – and brilliantly – replacing the light with the camera so that each character's existence is defined by being seen by the camera.

He makes a virtue of the fact that all film is constructed through repetition. Actors repeat lines over and over again in take after take from different angles, with different lenses, on still or moving camera. "And it's refined over time. Kubrick would shoot something like opening the door a hundred times. A line in a film is assembled from all those multiple possibilities being cut together. Traditionally, the whole of post-production is dedicated hiding all that." But Minghella's Play is like a negative of standard film-making. With over 300 cuts in 16 minutes – "It's a mosaic of all the versions we shot" – you're constantly aware of the editing. Instead of hiding the film-making technique, he exposes it in an outstandingly successful attempt to illuminate Beckett's text. It's not too far-fetched to say that the result is a strange but natural bedfellow to Hitchcock's Rear Window, the quintessential film about watching and being watched.

Not every film in the season is in that league. The world has known for years that casting doesn't solve everything. Even Burgess Meredith (Penguin from television's Batman) and Zero Mostel (mad Max Bialystock in The Producers) couldn't boost Alan Schneider's 1960 American television version of Godot. Mind you, it beat the American premiere in Miami which boasted Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz, and Tom Ewell, fresh from starring opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, in what the posters insanely described as "The Laugh SENSATION of Two Continents". Mercifully, Channel 4 director Michael Lindsay-Hogg has wisely jettisoned star casting in favour of major Irish acting talent. Yet even with seriously fine Beckett actors, the absurd comedy of Godot feels slightly stillborn with no audience laughter to play off.

When certain members of the Beckett estate saw production stills from Minghella's Play, they almost had seizures. Phone lines hummed. They shouldn't have worried. Ironically, by taking the most cinematic route, he has been truest of all to Beckett's supreme theatricality.

Beckett on Film: Channel 4 from Thursday